Philipp Ther wins the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2015

»A book on economy? A political book? Cultural history? Reportage or even memoirs? Naturally, those who observe the landscape of non-fiction publishing take many diverse genres into account. One of the many merits of Philipp Ther’s book is that it unites various genres in one volume. It’s a history book on concepts of economics and politics that embeds reporting passages into the text, and gives special consideration to personal memories.

In The New Order on the Old Continent, Philipp Ther retrieves the background on the reforms of 1989/90 from the files of the eighties, the recipes connected to names like Thatcher and Reagan. He describes the practices and side effects of the neoliberal therapies that were applied to the countries behind the former Iron Curtain during the 1990s and 2000s. But first and foremost, he travels through Prague or Bratislava or Budapest or through the plains with his readers. The book oscillates most illuminatingly between the descriptive and the abstract.

In the end, we have obtained a more precise notion of the – political, intellectual, material - shifts on the old continent in the past two or three decades; conflicts that have lead to the fact that today, there is a war being waged in Europe that is called the »Ukraine-Conflict«.